Kate Scardifield is an artist and materials researcher living and working on Gadigal Land. Her practice has sat at the nexus of art, design, science and technology for 15 years.

Kate undertakes expansive and collaborative projects that investigate materials through states of transformation, emphasising the importance of transitioning critical systems of production, and how we might enable more sustainable material systems and ecologies. Her artworks span large-scale installations, biological materials, adaptable textiles, sculpture, and video. They intertwine material culture studies and material science, generating different types of encounters with materials, and that surface different forms of new material knowledge.

Kate is the founder of Deep Blue Bio, a transdisciplinary studio and research network designing with biological processes and complex living systems. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) where she is Co-Director of the Material Ecologies Design Lab, and member of the Algal Biosystems and Biotechnology group in the UTS Climate Change Cluster (C3).

Recent exhibitions include Siteworks: From a Deep Valley, Bundanon Art Museum (2022-23); Pliable Planes: Expanded Textiles and Fibre Practices, UNSW Galleries, Freemantle Art Centre (2022-2024, touring); FREE/STATE: The Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, The Art Gallery of South Australia (2022); The lighter a thought the more it rises, Toi Moroki Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch, New Zealand (2019); Ley Lines, St Andrews Museum, Hawick Museum, and Calendar House, Scotland (2017-2018); and Microgravity, The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2017).

Her written works on new materials and material systems have been published across a range of platforms including Art Monthly Australasia, The Lifted Brow, and in academic journals including the Journal of Applied Phycology, the Journal of Cleaner Production, and World Futures Review.

B.1985 in Warang/Sydney, Scardifield grew up in the intertidal zone, at the edges of rockpools and with the Pacific Ocean. Her father taught her the magic and chemistry of the kitchen, and how to cook. She is a sailor, advanced diver, and an ocean swimmer. It's through experimentation and years spent making, she is perceptible to the most subtle shifts in a material’s composition, changes in its chemistry, and the powerful relationships between matter, aesthetics and experience. She lives with the sea and its currents, and in awe of the deep blue.